Gamers unleash swarms of nanoparticles on tumours

CANCER is nothing to play around with. But a new online game encourages people to do just that, fiddling with swarms of nanoparticles to come up with promising strategies for attacking tumours.

The game, called NanoDoc, trains players on a few basic rules, including the types of nanoparticles in their arsenal and how they swarm through tissue to find cancerous cells. It then lets players try challenges, which feature real configurations of tumour cells, some of which researchers have yet to find an effective treatment for. The idea is that, as crowds of online users chip away at these tough problems, they will find solutions researchers haven't thought of yet, leading to improved treatments.

"We want bioengineers to come in and design the scenarios," says Sabine Hauert, a swarm engineer at the Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research at MIT, who released NanoDoc online last week.

Hauert was inspired by the protein-folding game FoldIt, in which online users help determine the optimal folding patterns of proteins. The difference is that, in playing NanoDoc, citizen scientists are designing treatments for specific tumour scenarios.

Players can adjust a range of variables to design nanoparticles for a particular job – the size of each particle, the number of them in a swarm, the coating on those particles and the dose of drugs they carry. These can be combined to produce a range of effects, including search-and-destroy behaviour, where one kind of particle seeks out a tumour, then signals the location to drug-bearing particles.

Any solutions that NanoDoc players come up with will be verified in computer models, and using swarms of nanobots in a lab, to make sure the particles move efficiently and leave healthy tissues alone. If the simulations are successful, researchers can move on to biological testing.

Aaron Becker, who works on swarm simulation at Rice University in Houston, Texas, says he is looking forward to seeing what will come out of NanoDoc, and adds that it is a great platform for education. "My 4-year-old son Logan was delighted to see those ugly grey tumour cells 'pop' out of existence, and stayed engaged as we completed the tutorials," he says.

This article appeared in print under the headline "Gamers get to work on hard-to-treat tumours"

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